Mobile communication devices such as mobile phones and tablets have become a fact of everyday life. Vast groups of people own a mobile phone and use it on daily or even hourly basis. Most of these mobile phones nowadays are smartphones. Smartphones can be defined as a mobile communication device in the form of a mobile phone with advanced processing power and a versatile advanced mobile operating system running thereon. This enables employment of a plurality of features such as, but not restricted to, media player functionality, global positioning system functionality, camera's, applications, etc. In fact, modern smartphones can be considered mobile computers arranged for performing both speech and data communication over any one or more of cellular networks, local area networks, wide area networks, internet, etc. Modern smartphones have processing power equal to conventional personal computers, and as such have huge technical potential.
Tablets are also mobile communication devices with capabilities similar to those of smartphones. Although the definition of a tablets is not standardized it can be considered as having a larger display than that of a smartphone and lacks cellular network communication support. Wherein in the present application mobile communication device is mentioned, a smartphone, tablet or the like is meant.
Mobile communication devices such as smartphones and tablets have in common that they comprise at least a communication module for local and wide area communication and a camera module for making photos and/or videos. These photos and videos are considered digital media and can be stored in the device on an internal storage medium such as a non-volatile flash memory. This internal storage medium can be an integral part of the device, e.g. it can not be taken out of the device, or it can be provided in the form of a non-volatile memory card that can be removed from the device and read/written in other devices.
Since these mobile communication devices have become commonplace for most people, the amount of photo's taken by these devices increases rapidly. It is even increasingly common for a single person to own multiple mobile communication devices such as one or more tablets, smartphones, and the like. Many people that own multiple devices, or even share devices for example within a family, often have the desire to access digital media from one device that is stored locally on a different device Thus for example, a person owns both a smartphone and a tablet but wants to view a series of photos on the tablet while the photos are taken with the smartphone and stored locally on the internal storage medium of the smartphone. In another example a friend or relative of the first person owning at least one of these devices wants to view the series of photos on their own smartphone while the photos are stored on the internal storage medium of the smartphone of the first person.
To solve these problems, it is known in the art to share the photos via telecommunication mediums such as the internet. The first person, being the owner of the tablet on which the series of photos are located can email the photos to the second person such that he or she can view them from their own device. This however has several drawbacks. First of all, both devices need to be able to communicate over a telecommunication network such as the internet. Secondly, the telecommunication network needs to be available, not all areas have good coverage. And thirdly, applications such as email often have file size restrictions that are insufficient to transfer videos, high resolution photos, or series of photos and/or videos. Web services by which larger file sizes can be transferred also have restrictions and require telecommunication network availability, bandwidth and server resources, which are all limited. Moreover, not all mobile operating systems running on mobile devices are directly compatible with these services. For most mobile devices a computer is required which is to be used as intermediate download terminal, from which terminal the files can be synchronized with a mobile device.
The coverage of for example some cellular networks in some countries is far from 100%. Moreover, indoor coverage is often far from 100% either. If a person is not connected with their home base station, if the person is for example abroad, network roaming will significantly add up to the expenses charged by the telecom provider. Since digital media like photos and videos in particular are of large size, the roaming costs for sharing content over a telecommunication network when being abroad will increase rapidly. Moreover, some mobile communication devices such as a tablet are often not arranged to communicate over mobile cellular networks. These tablets require a Wi-Fi connection to connect with the internet. This in turn require availability of a public Wi-Fi network which is far for common in most countries and regions. Moreover, users that want to share their digital content from a joint (social) activity, are mostly in close proximity of each other during the joint activity. This is often a location in which either telecommunication network is limited or absent, e.g. on the piste during a ski activity, or wherein bandwidth is limited, e.g. during a festival. Hence, establishing a connection with the other users of the joint activity can be very difficult.
Yet a further disadvantage of known photo or video sharing applications that use the internet a file sharing platform, e.g. photo sharing on a cloud based application, is that these applications require comprehensive registration processes. In order to determine whether a user of a mobile communication device is allowed to upload photos to the cloud based share, the user has to be registered. For the registration and subsequent authentication, the user must often fill in personal information on the website. Besides the fact that such a registration process forms a barrier for the use of the application, it is also undesirable from a privacy point of view. Moreover, since the photo's and video's are stored on the cloud storage, the users often, by accepting the end user license agreement, waive their copyrights.
In view of the large and ever increasing amounts of digital media generated and conveyed by telecommunications networks nowadays, optimization in terms of data capacity at the networks itself on the one hand, and availability and flexibility of digital media on the other hand becomes more and more important.